Three Reasons Why Every Smart Startup Is A Digital Media Company

Seems like a silly question. Even if you reply “Just once,” you seem bad at math at best.

But this is the exact mentality that’s fueling Internet Gold Rush 2.0. People look at companies like Instagram (acquired for a billion without a dime of revenue), and even Twitter, which started as something a few comfortably wealthy guys created for fun.

These stories get all the press. Just like those Mega Millions lottery winners last month.

These are exactly the wrong examples to pay attention to, because they provide little true business-building insight (other than luck happens). The self-serving noise coming from Silicon Valley fuels the lottery mentality, because the investors have learned how to buy tickets in bulk.

And yet, there’s never been a better time to start your own company. There is a true entrepreneurial gold rush going on thanks to the Internet … it just may be a bit different than you think.

The true online opportunity for entrepreneurs is in content. It’s about blazing a path as a digital media producer, while redefining media business models for the better.

Here are three big reasons why.

1. The Content is the Marketing

You spend months in stealth mode, building the delicious new product so cool that you’re worried someone might steal it. Finally, the day comes to ship, and …

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Thank you so much for sharing – you’ve turned my thinking about business development around. This is the missing piece of the puzzle in the lean startup approach.

I’ve been trying to put your advice into practice, and struggling with selection of the topic. Should it be broad or narrow? Should it primarily cover popular topics?

Say you want to write for the audience of entrepreneurs on the topic related to new business development. You can write a bit about marketing, sales, finance, innovation… Or you could focus on marketing. Or even more – on content marketing. Or even more, on blogging for small business.

Or can you take the topic selection also as a part of the agile approach, start with your best guess and iterate?

Excellent *content* as usual, Brian, and you really make a strong case for the advantages of lean-startup, agile content dev, and MVA/MVP.

Something that was basically dismissed right at the beginning of the article though, may warrant further investigation ;)

Richard Wiseman, author of The Luck Factor, has some pretty interesting ideas to share, and I’m sure you’ve read Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. These guys talk about success in a very different way.

While I don’t go around encouraging people to bank on the lottery, both of these men have brilliant insight into the Instagrams + Twitters of the world.

Not only that, successful chick Amber Rae, who’s worked with Derek Sivers + Seth Godin + more, had little-to-know “strategy” other than “be herself” and “follow her heart” and posted about it just this week : http://tumblr.heyamberrae.com/post/21846631213/find-your-voice

Again, this isn’t to make a massive case or disagree with your phenomenal wisdom, much of which I apply — it’s simply to generate discussion and look at other (albeit ‘more vague’, ‘less tangible) solutions.

Great article. I love the minimum viable audience idea concept. I’ve been using a thought like that (without knowing it – on my blog for small business owners and a new blog about student loans) and have started to see the results.

Brian…Would you ever recommend that a startup close down publicly accepting new clients in order to go back into audience growth mode? We’ve got enough clients right now that we’re making money and we’re streamlining processes to enable more efficient scaling. However, if we hid our pricing, eliminated our “buy now” buttons and only accepted opt-ins…do you think we’d get just that? A bigger audience?

No, I wouldn’t do that. If you’ve got a working business model, keep working it.

Just keep amping the value of the content you provide, and the audience should grow thanks to the social sharing that naturally results. Remember though, you’re building your audience to further build your business, not for some other abstract reason.

Great article Brian! The Lean Startup was exactly the book my team read before launching our site (clearmyguilt.com) and we’ve (without even realizing it) have been focusing on the audience in front of the site/product, doing a lot of testing and R&D behind the scene. You’ve definitely painted a clearer picture for us though in reference to thinking like a media company. The most exciting part for startups today and in the future is the variety of monetization opportunities that are surfacing in a multi-device, multi-platform, multi-media oriented, mobile, and socially connected world.